With 20 years of experience as a devotional polytheist and spirit-worker, Sarah Kate Istra Winter presents a second collection of short essays and poems examining a life in the company of gods and spirits. A companion to Dwelling on the Threshold, Between the Worlds covers a wide range of topics, including localizing reconstructionist traditions, resisting distractions from the spiritual path, exploring altered states of consciousness, problems in the pagan community, the importance of discernment, communicating with the divine, animism in practice, deepening devotional relationships, the challenges of mysticism, and working magic in both worlds at once. This is holy Work, but it doesn't come with a map. For those wandering through these often mysterious lands, the knowledge and guidance shared within these pages will provide some small illumination of the road ahead.
About the Author: Sarah Kate Istra Winter, also known as Dver, is a spirit-worker on the margins of Hellenic polytheism, with ties to English, Germanic and Slavic folk traditions as well. She has been a priestess of Dionysos for two decades, has long paid cultus to Hermes, Hekate, and Odin (among others), and is deeply devoted to a host of personal and local spirits. Her practices include entheogenic trance, pathwalking, bone-working, divination, masking and mumming, liminal magic, and devotional worship. She is also an artist who works in an ever-changing variety of mediums as a means of creating tangible artefacts to bridge the worlds.
A passionate writer before she could even properly read, she currently writes non-fiction with occasional poetry, and has been published in several pagan and polytheist magazines, journals and newsletters. Her books on religious topics include Kharis: Hellenic Polytheism Explored, Komos: Celebrating Festivals in Contemporary Hellenic Polytheism, and the companion to this book, Dwelling on the Threshold: Reflections of a Spirit-Worker and Devotional Polytheist. She earned her Bachelor's degree at Goddard College in Comparative Mythology and Ritual.
Dver was raised in New England, but has found a home in the lush, green, nymph-haunted Pacific Northwest. She spends her days doing ritual and making art, tramping through the woods looking for mushrooms, animal bones, and spirits, working through large stacks of library books, and talking to invisible people. Her many blogs, books, services, and other projects can be found at BirdSpiritLand.com.
